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Invisibility 23work inevitably reveals the correspondingly effective manner inwhich the missionaries were able to identify themselves with thepeople—‘to be all things to all men’—and to communicate theirmessage in terms which have meaning for the lives of the people”(Nida 1975:250), he was echoing what he had earlier asserted of theBible translator in God’s Word in Man’s Language (1952): “The task ofthe true translator is one of identification. As a Christian servant hemust identify with Christ; as a translator he must identify himselfwith the Word; as a missionary he must identify himself with thepeople” (Nida 1952:117). Both the missionary and the translator mustfind the dynamic equivalent in the target language so as to establishthe relevance of the Bible in the target culture. But Nida permits onlya particular kind of relevance to be established. While he disapprovesof “the tendency to promote by means of Bible translating the causeof a particular theological viewpoint, whether deistic, rationalistic,immersionistic, millenarian, or charismatic” (Nida and de Waard1986:33), it is obvious that he himself has promoted a reception of thetext centered in Christian dogma. And although he offers a nuancedaccount of how “diversities in the backgrounds of receptors” canshape any Bible translation, he insists that “translations preparedprimarily for minority groups must generally involve highlyrestrictive forms of language, but they must not involve substandardgrammar or vulgar wording” (ibid.:14). Nida’s concept of dynamicequivalence in Bible translation goes hand in hand with anevangelical zeal that seeks to impose on English-language readers aspecific dialect of English as well as a distinctly Christianunderstanding of the Bible. When Nida’s translator identifies with thetarget-language reader to communicate the foreign text, hesimultaneously excludes other target-language culturalconstituencies.To advocate foreignizing translation in opposition to the Anglo-American tradition of domestication is not to do away withcultural political agendas—such an advocacy is itself an agenda.The point is rather to develop a theory and practice of translationthat resists dominant target-language cultural values so as tosignify the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text.Philip Lewis’s concept of “abusive fidelity” can be useful in sucha theorization: it acknowledges the abusive, equivocal relationshipbetween the translation and the foreign text and eschews a fluentstrategy in order to reproduce in the translation whatever featuresof the foreign text abuse or resist dominant cultural values in the